There was complete silence in the large room, filled with long, wavering shadows that the flickering firelight chased over the walls and amongst the gilt-edged tables.

Beyond the windows the dusk was gathering quickly in the wind-swept street, beneath the leaden sky. From the pane nearest the fire a side-light fell across a man’s figure leaning against the corner of the mantel-shelf. A ruddy glow from the hearth struck upon the silk skirt of a girl leaning back in the easy-chair beneath the other corner.

Her face is lost in the shadow.

He is a good-looking fellow, very. The high white collar that shows up in the dusk is fastened round a long, well-set neck; the figure in the blue serge suit is straight and pleasing, and the shoulders erect and slim.

The girl’s eyes, looking out of the shadow, take in these points, and the pleasure they give her seems inextricably confused with dull pain. Her gaze passes on to his face, and rests eagerly, almost thirstily, upon it.

There is light enough still to show her its well-cut oval, spoiled now by the haggard falling in of the cheeks, the lines in the forehead, and the swellings beneath the eyes.

He shifts his position a little and glances through the window. His eyes are full of irritation, and the girl knows it, though they are turned from her. She gives a suppressed, inaudible sigh; his attitude now brings out the impatient discontent on his mouth and the rigid determination of the chin.

“I suppose you mean two people can live upon nothing?” His voice is cold, even hostile, and he speaks apparently to the panes, but the tones are well-bred and pleasing; and again the girl wonders dimly which is the predominating sensation in her-pleasure or pain.

“No,” she says, in rather a suffocated voice. “But I say, if either person has enough, or the two together, it does not matter which has it, or which has the most.”

Silence, which her hesitating, timid voice breaks at last.

“Does it?”

“Yes, I think it does,” he answered shortly. “The man must have enough to support both, or he has no right to marry at all.”

The girl’s hands lock themselves together convulsively, unseen behind her slight waist, laced so skilfully into the fashionable bodice.

There is a hard decision in the incisive tones that does not belong to the mere expression of a general theory-a cold authority and a weight of personal conviction that turns the words into a statement of rigid principle.

The girl feels almost dizzy, and she closes her hot eyelids suddenly to shut out the line of that hard, obstinate chin.

“People’s ideas on what is enough to support both vary so much,” she says quietly, with well-bred indifference in her tone, while her heart beats wildly as she waits for his next remark.

“Well, what would you consider enough yourself?” he says coldly, after a slight pause, turning a little more towards her.

The red light glows steadily on her skirts, and he can see the graceful outline of her knees under them, and one small foot upon the hearthrug; the rest of the form is veiled in the shadow, except one rounded line of a shoulder and the glint of light hair above.

He looks down at her, and there seems a sudden, nervous expansion in his frame; outwardly there is not the faintest impatient movement. He waits quietly for her reply.

The girl hesitates as she looks at him. To her, in her absorbing love for the man before her, the question is an absurd mockery.

To reduce to a certain number of pounds this “enough,” when for her anything or nothing would be enough!

“I would rather starve to death in your arms than live another day without you,” is the current running under all her thoughts, and it confuses them and makes it difficult for her to speak.

What shall she answer? To name a sum too small in his eyes will be as great an error as to name one too large. He would only think her a silly, sentimental girl, who knows nothing of what she is talking about, and who has no knowledge and appreciation of the responsibilities of life.

Besides, to name a very small income will be to conjure up before his eyes the picture of a mean, pitiful, sordid existence, from which she feels, with painful distinctness, he would turn with disgust.

Poor? Yes, he has told her that he is poor, and she believes it; but somehow-by contracting debt, probably-she thinks, as her keen, observant eyes sweep over him, he manages at present to live and dress as a gentleman.

Those well-cut suits, those patent shoes and expensive cigarettes; these things, she feels instinctively, must be preserved for him, or any form of life would lose its charm.

At the same time, she must mention something that is not hopelessly beyond him. She recalls her own two hundred; surely, at the least, he must be making one.

“I can hardly say,” she murmured at last, “because personally I think one can live on so very little; but I suppose most people would say-well, about three hundred pounds a year.”

“Oh! three hundred a year,” he says, stretching out his hand for the tea-cup on a low table beside him. The tea has grown cold in the discussion of abstract questions. He takes the cup and sits down deliberately in the corner of the couch opposite her, and stirs the tea slowly.

“How much is that a week? Five pounds fifteen, isn’t it? Well, now, go on, see what you can make of it. Your house-the smallest-and servants-”

“House and servants!” interrupts the girl, “but why have a house and servants at all?”

“I don’t know,” he rejoins curtly, “because the girl generally expects those things when she marries.”

“Not all girls,” she says, and one seems to hear the smile with which she says it in her voice.

“You mean rooms?” he says quickly, with a gleam of pleasure breaking for a moment across his face.

“Well-say rooms-you would want three-thirty shillings, I suppose, at the least, and then another thirty for board. That leaves two fifteen for everything else.”

“Surely that’s a good deal.”

“Oh, I don’t know; think of one’s clothes,” and Stephen stares moodily into the fire, with a pricking recollection of a tailor’s bill for twenty odd in his drawer at home now.

Then, to remove the impression of selfish extravagance he feels he may have given, he adds:

“And a man wants to give his wife some amusement, and three hundred a year leaves nothing for that.”

“Amusement!” the girl repeats, starting up and standing upright, with one elbow just touching the mantelpiece, and the firelight flooding her figure from the slim waist downwards. “What amusement does a woman want if she is in love with the man she is living with? The man himself is her amusement! To watch him when he is occupied, to wait for him when he is away, to nurse him when he is ill-that is her amusement: she does not want any other!”

Stephen stares at the flexible form, and listens to the words that he would admire, only the cynical suspicion is in his mind that she is talking for effect. His general habit was to consider all women mercenary and untrustworthy. Deep in his heart-for he had a heart, though contracted from want of use-lay a hungry desire to be loved, really loved for himself; and the very keenness of the longing, and the anxiety not to be deceived, lessened his powers of penetration, and blinded him to the girl’s character.

He laughs slightly. “You are taking a theatrical view of the whole thing!”

“How do you mean?”

“Oh, well, that the wife really loves her husband and sticks to him through everything, and they pass through unheard-of difficulties together, and so on”; but he adds, with a faint yawn: “I’ve always noticed that when the money goes the love disappears too. There’s no love where there’s abject poverty.”

“But three hundred a year is not abject poverty,” answers the girl in a quiet tone, not denying his theory for fear of being called again theatrical.

“No,” he admits. “Oh, it might do very well as long as there were only two; but then, when there are children, it means a nurse, and all sorts of expenses.”

He says the words with a simplicity and directness that makes the girl almost catch her breath. For these two were not on intimate terms with each other, not even terms of intimate speaking.

Nothing had passed between them yet but the merest society phrases, and before a certain quiet dinner one month back neither knew of the other’s existence. Since then some chance meetings on the beach, the parade, the pier, a few long afternoon rows, between then and now: these are the only nourishment the flame in either breast has received-a flame kindled in a few long glances across the dinner-table.

But this afternoon he has laid aside the customary phrases and deliberately commenced the present conversation.

True, it is purely an abstract one-all theory and hypotheses. No one could say otherwise if it were repeated. Not a personal word has been uttered on either side; but the girl feels in the determined tone of his voice, in the studied way he started it, in the cold precision with which he follows it, that it is practically a test conversation of herself, and that she is virtually passing through an examination.

He has come this afternoon with a set of certain questions that he means to put, to all of which her answers are received without comment, and mentally noted down.

He neither repeats himself, nor presses a point, nor leaves out anything on his mental list, nor allows any remark to lead away from it.

He has also certain things he means to say, which he will say, as he asks his questions, deliberately, one after the other; and then, when he has heard and said all he intends, he will terminate the conversation as decisively as he began it and go. The girl feels all this, for her brain is as clear and keen as the glance of her eyes.

She knows that he is testing her: that she stands upon trial before him.

She has nothing to hide: only, that too great love and devotion, that seems to swell and swell irrepressibly within her, and would pour itself out in words to him, but that his tone, his manner, his look keep it back absolutely, as a firm hand holds down the rising cork upon the exuberant wine. And now, at this sentence of his, her words fail her. They are strangers practically, that is conventionally-quite strangers, she remembers confusedly-but for this secret bond of passion, knit up between them, which both can feel but both ignore.

The natural male in him, and the natural female in her, are already, as it were, familiar, but the fashionable man and girl are strangers still.

Then, now, how is she to say what she wishes to him? How can she talk with this mere acquaintance upon this subject? The very word “children” seems to scorch her lips. At the same time, familiarity with him seems natural and unnatural; terrible, and yet simple.

Then, too, what are his views?

Will her next words shock him inexpressibly?

In her passionate, excitable brain, inflamed with love for the man, the idea of maternity can merely present itself like an unwelcome, grey-clad Quaker at a banquet.

She hesitates, choosing her words. She knows so little of the man in front of her. His clothes, she sees, are of the newest cut, but his notions may not be.

At last her soft, weak, timid voice breaks the pause.

“Do you think it necessary to have very large families?”

“No, I don’t,” he answers instantly with the energy and alacrity of one who is glad to express his opinion. “No, I don’t, not at all.”

The girl’s suspended breath is drawn again. Unlike himself in his queries she presses her point home.

“Don’t you think those marriages are the happiest where there are no children?”

“Yes,” he says decidedly, getting up and thrusting his hands into his coat pockets. “Yes, I do-much the happiest.”

There is silence. It is too dark for either to see the other’s expression. He stands irresolutely for a minute or two, and then says with a disagreeable laugh:

“I should hate my own children! Fancy coming home and finding a lot of children crying and screaming in the place.”

To this the girl says nothing, and Stephen, after a minute’s reflection, softens his words.

“Besides, your wife’s love, when she has children, is all given to them.”

“Yes,” murmurs her well-bred voice. “Oh, yes, one is happier without them.”

Neither speak. They are agreed so far; there is a deep relief and pleasure in the breast of each.

“Well,” he says at last, rousing himself, “I must go. I shall be late for dinner.”

The girl leans down and stirs the fire into a leaping, yellow blaze. It fills the room with light, and reveals them fully now to each other.

She makes no effort to detain him, and they look at each other, about to part.

The self-control of each is marvellous, and admirable for its mere thoroughness and completeness.

He has large eyes, and they stare down at her haggardly, as he stands facing her in the light. The hungry, hopeless look in those eyes and the drawn lines in his face go to the girl’s heart, and to herself it seems literally melting into one warm flood of sympathy.

Ill! he looks ill and wretched, and she longs with a longing that presses upon her, till it is like a physical agony, to give some way to her feelings.

“Dearest, my dearest!” she is thinking, “if I might only tell you-even a little-”

And Stephen stares at the soft face and warm lips, half-paralyzed with desire to bend down and kiss them. How would a kiss be? how would they-And so there is a momentary, barely perceptible pause, filled with a painful intensity of feeling, to which neither gives way one hair’s breadth. Then he gives a curt laugh.

“We have discussed rather a difficult problem and not settled it,” he says in a conventional tone.

“It seems to me quite simple,” murmurs the girl, with a throat so dry that the words are hardly audible.

He hears, but makes no reply beyond another slight laugh, as he holds out his hand. The girl puts hers into it. There is a moderate pressure only on either side, and then he goes out and shuts the door, leaving the girl standing motionless-all the warm springs in her heart frozen by his last cynical laugh.

Brookes finds his way down the stairs, through the unlighted hall, and lets himself out in the chill October air.

He goes down the street feeling a confused sense of having inflicted pain and left distress behind him, but his own sensation of irritation, his own vexation and angry resentment against his lot in life, all but obliterate it.

For some seconds he walks on with all his thoughts merged together in a mere desperate and painful confusion. “Only a hundred a year!” is his plainest, most bitter reflection. “Five-and-twenty, and only earning a hundred a year!”

Brookes is not of a calm temperament. His nervous system is tensely strung, and generally, owing to various incidental matters, slightly out of tune, or at anyrate, feels so.

His circulation is rapid, every pulse beats strongly, and the blood flows hotly in his veins.

His mental nature is of much the same order-passionate, excitable, and impatient; but there is such a heavy curb-rein of control perpetually upon it, that its three leading qualities jar inwardly upon himself more than they show to outsiders.

Even now the confused, excited disorder in his brain is soon regulated and calmed by his will, and as he walks on he lapses into trying to recollect whether he has said all he meant to.

He concludes that he has, and a certain satisfaction comes over him.

“Well, I have told her my views now,” he reflects. “She sees what I think, and what my principles are. She won’t wonder that I say nothing. I shall try for another post and a rise of salary, and then-”

Stephen’s character was a fine one in its way. The capacity for self-command and self-denial was tremendous, his sense of honour keen, his adherence to that which he conceived the right inflexible, his will immutable; but of the subtler sweetness of the human heart he had none.

Of sympathy, the divine [Greek: sym, pathos], the suffering with, he had not the vaguest conception: of its faint and poor reflections, pity and mercy, he had but a dim idea.

He stuck as well as he could to what he thought was the right path, and as to the feelings of others, he could not be blamed for not considering them, for he had never practically realized that they had any.

In the present circumstances he had a few, fine, adamantine rules for conduct, which he was going to steadfastly apply, and he thought no more of the girl’s feelings under them than one thinks of the inanimate parcel one is cording with what one knows is good, stout string.

In his eyes it was distinctly dishonourable for a man to engage a girl to himself without a reasonably near prospect of marriage.

It was also decidedly ungentlemanly to propose to a girl if she had money and you had none. Moreover, it was extremely selfish to remove a girl from a comfortable position to a poorer one, though she might positively swear she preferred it; and lastly, it was unwise for various reasons, to be too amiable to the girl, or to give any but the dimmest clue to your own feelings.

There was no telling-your feelings might change even-when you have to wait so long-and then it was much better, for the girl, that she should not be tied to you.

To visit the girl frequently, to hang about her to the amusement of onlookers, to keep alive her passion by look and hint and innuendo, to excite her by advances when he was in the humour, and studiously repulse her when she made any, to act almost as if he were her fiancé, and curtly resent it if she ever assumed he was more than an ordinary friend-this line of action he saw no fault in. The above were his views, and they were excellent, and if the girl didn’t understand them she might do the other thing.

Some weeks passed, and the man and the girl saw each other constantly-three or four times in the week, perhaps more; and the inward irritation grew intense, while their outward relations remained unchanged.

There was a certain brutality that crept into the man’s tones occasionally when he addressed her, a certain savage irritability in manner, that told the girl’s keen intelligence something; some involuntary sighs of hers as she sat near him, and an increasing look of exhaustion on her face, that told him something. But that was all.

There were no tender passages between them; none of the conventional English flirting-matters were too serious, and the nature of each too violent to permit of that. A little bitter, more or less hostile, conversation passed between them on the most trifling subjects in his long afternoon calls. A little music would be attempted-that is, he would sing song after song, while she accompanied him, but a song was rarely completed. Generally, before or at the middle, he would seize the music in a gust of irrepressible and barely-veiled irritability, and fling it on the piano-yet they attempted the music with unwavering persistence, and both rose to go to the instrument with mutual alacrity.

There they were close to each other-so close that the warmth and breath of their beings were interchanged. There in the pursuit of a fallen sheet of music, his head bent down and touched hers. Once, apparently to regain the leaf, his hand and arm leaned hard upon her lap. One second, perhaps, no more; but the girl’s whole strained system seemed breaking up at the touch-her control shattered, like machinery violently reversed.

The music leaf was replaced, but her hands had fallen nerveless from the keys.

“It is hot. I can’t go on playing. Put the window open, will you, for me?”

Stephen walked to the window, raised it, and smiled into the dark.

That night it seemed to Stephen he could never force himself to leave the girl. He prolonged the playing past all reasonable limits, until May’s sister laughingly reminded him that they were only staying in seaside lodgings, and other occupants of the house must be considered. Stephen reluctantly relinquished the friendly piano, and then stood, with May’s sweet figure beside him, and her upraised face clear to the side vision of his eye, talking to her sister.

At last, when every trifle is exhausted of which he can make conversation, there comes a pause, a silence; he can think of nothing more. He nerves himself, holds out his hand, and says, “Good-night!”

May, influenced equally by the same indomitable aversion to be separated from him, follows him outside the drawing-room, and another pause is made on the stair. By this time a fresh stock of chaff and light wit is ready in Stephen’s brain, and he makes use of anything and everything to procure him another moment at her side; but of all the passion within him, of the ardent, impetuous impulse towards her, nothing, not the faintest trace, shows.

A mere “Good-night!” ends their conversation at length, and the girl did not re-enter the drawing-room, but passed straight up the stairs to her own room.

“Does he care? Does he care or not?” she asked herself, walking ceaselessly backwards and forwards. “If I only knew that he did! This is killing me; and suppose, after all, he does not care!”

She almost reels in her walk, and then stretches her arms out on her mantelpiece, and leans her head heavily upon them.

“So this is being in love!” she thinks, with a faint satirical smile. “All this anxiety and pain and feeling of illness! Why, it is as if poison had been poured through me.”

Through the next day May lay pallid and silent on the couch, without pretence of occupation, feeling too exhausted even to respond to her sister’s chaff and raillery.

It was only at dinner, when her brother-in-law informed his wife he was sick of the place, and that nothing would induce him to stay more than another week, that a stain of scarlet colour appeared in May’s cheeks and a terrified dilation in her eyes.

Her lids were lowered directly, and the blood receded again. She made no remark, but at the close of dinner she excused herself, and went upstairs alone.

Once in her room, she stripped off her dinner-dress and shoes, and re-dressed in morning things. Her hands trembled so violently that she could hardly fasten her bodice over the wildly-expanding bosom.

But her resolve was fixed. They were going in a week. To-morrow, she knew, Stephen was leaving the place for a fortnight. She must see him to-night.

When she is completely dressed, she pauses for a moment to choke down the terrible physical excitement that seems to rob her of breath and muscular power.

Then she passes downstairs quietly and goes out.

The night is still, cold, and dark.

May walks rapidly through the few streets that divide his house and hers.

The few men she meets turn involuntarily to glance after the splendid form that goes by them, and in her decisive walk, in the eyes blind to them, they feel instinctively she is already owned, mentally or actually, by some one other.

When she reaches Stephen’s house, she learns he is in, and with a great fear of him suddenly rushing over her, she sends word up to him by the servant: Will he see her?

While she waits in the hall, her message is taken upstairs. May leans against the wall, a terrible sick faintness, born of excitement and hysteria, coming suddenly upon her.

There is a hall-chair, but her eyes are too darkened to see it; she simply clings to the handle of the door, and lets her head sink against the side of the passage.

Brookes is upstairs with his brother and two friends; they have been playing cards, but a game is just over, and the men have got up to stretch themselves.

Stephen himself is leaning back against the mantelpiece, as his habit is, and yawning slightly. He has just been beaten, and he is a man who can’t play a losing game.

“No,” his brother remarks. “I didn’t know what the deuce ‘Ladas’ meant till I looked it up; did you, Steve?”

“Oh, I should think every schoolboy would know that,” is the curt response, and at that moment the servant’s knock comes at the door.

“Please, sir, there’s a lady as wants to see you,” the girl says with a perceptible grin. “She said she wouldn’t come up, and she’s waiting in the hall, sir.”

There is a blank silence in the room. Brookes pales suddenly, and his eyebrows, that habitually have a supercilious elevation, rise still higher with annoyance.

He hesitates a single second, then, without a word in reply, he crosses the room towards the door, and the servant retreats hastily.

The men glance furtively at each other, but Stephen’s devil of a temper being well known, they forbear to laugh or even smile till he is well out of the room. Brookes goes down the stairs with one sentence only in his mind: Coming to my rooms, and making a fool of me!

He is annoyed, intensely annoyed, and that is his sole feeling.

May is standing upright now in the centre of the hall under the swinging lamp, and she watches him run lightly down the long flight of stairs towards her with swimming eyes.

What is there in that figure of his that has so much influence on her senses? More, perhaps, even than his face, do the lines of his neck and shoulders and their carriage please her. All the pleasure she can ever realise in life seems contained for her in that slim, well-made frame, in its blue serge suit.

She makes one impetuous step forward, her whole form dominated, impelled by the surge of ardent feelings within her, and holds out one trembling, burning hand. Stephen, with a confused sense of its being awfully bad form that she should be standing in his hall, takes it in his right hand, feeling hastily for the lucifers with his left.

“Er-come into the dining-room, won’t you?” he says, with the familiar, supercilious accent that with him is the expression of suppressed annoyance and slight embarrassment.

He knows the rooms are unlet, and with gratitude for this providential circumstance in his thoughts, and his heart beating violently with sudden excitement now he is actually in her presence, he turns the handle of the door and sets it wide open.

He strikes a match and holds it up, leaning back against the door, for her to pass in before him.

As she does so, their two figures for one second almost touch each other, and a sudden glow lights up in his veins. He feels it, and it warns him instantly to summon his self-control. That before everything.

The next moment he follows her into the room, lights the gas, returns to the door, closes it, and then comes back towards the rug where she is standing.

By this time his command is his own. His face is as calm as a mask. His large eyes, somewhat bloodshot now from hours of smoking and a sleepless night, rest upon her with cold enquiry.

She has seen them once, met them once, fixed, liquid, with passionate longing upon hers; desperately she seeks in them now for one gleam of the same light, but there is none. They and his face are cloaked in a cold reserve. Sick, and with her heart beating to suffocation, she says, as he waits for her to explain her presence:

“We are-going away.”

Stephen’s heart seems to contract at the words he had so often dreaded to hear, heard at last.

His thoughts take a greyer hopelessness.

“Oh, really!” he says merely, the shock he feels only slightly intensifying his habitual drawl. “Not immediately, I hope?”

Nothing to the nervous, excited, over-strained girl before him could be more galling, more humiliating, more crushing than the cold, conventional politeness of his tones and words.

This frightful fence of Society manner that he will put between them-a slight, delicate defence, is as effectual as if he caused a precipice by magic to yawn between them.

“No-not-not-quite immediately, but soon,” she falters. “And it seems as if I could not exist if-I-never see you.”

There is a strained pause while they stand facing each other. He is motionless; one hand rests in his pocket, the other hangs nerveless at his side.

They look at each other. Each is thinking of the supreme delight-even if momentary-the other’s embrace could give if-but the conditions in the respective minds are different-in his: “If I thought it wise;” in hers: “If he only would.”

“Well, we can write to each other,” he says at last.

“Oh, but what are letters?” the girl says passionately; and then, urged on hard by her love for him, her intuition of his love for her, and her common-sense instinct not to throw away her life’s happiness for a misunderstanding or petty feeling of pride, she adds: “You know-don’t you?-that I care for you more than anything else in the world.”

Her tones are sharp with the intensity of feeling, and she stretches both hands imploringly a little way towards him.

He sees them quiver and her face whiten, and the frightened appeal increase in her pained eyes searching his face, and it is a marvel-later, he marvels at it himself-how, with his own passion keen and alive in him, he maintains his ground. But there is something in the whole scene that jars upon him-something theatrical that makes the thought flash upon him: Is it a got-up thing?

This puts him on the defensive directly; besides, he resents her coming to him in this way, and endeavouring to surprise from him words he has already explained to her he is unwilling to say.

She is trying to rush him, he puts it to himself; and the thought rouses all his own obstinacy and self-will.

When he chooses he will speak, and not before.

“It is very good of you to say so,” he answers quietly, in a cold formal tone, and the girl quivers as if he had struck her.

Now, in his lonely, sleepless nights, the misery on the white face comes back and back to him in the darkness of his room, but then he is blind to it.

In an annoyed mood to begin with, irritated beyond bearing by his own helpless, ignominious position, as he fancies, he has no perception left for his own danger of losing her.

And the man, who had lived till five-and-twenty, desiring real love, and not knowing it, deliberately trampled upon it without recognising what he did.

His words cut the girl terribly.

It seems impossible for the second that she can force herself to speak again to him, but the terrible, irrepressible longing within her nerves her for one more effort.

“Is that all you can tell me? Do you not care for me at all?”

He looks at her and hesitates. So modest, so appealing, so timid, and yet so passionate! Surely this is genuine love for him. Why thrust it back? But the thought recurs. No. She is rushing him; and he declines to be rushed. Also a sort of half-embarrassment comes over him, a nervous instinct to put off, ward off a scene in which he will be called upon to demonstrate feelings he may not satisfy.

He laughs slightly, and says:

“Of course I do! I like you very much!”

The tones are slighting and contemptuous, enough so to convey the polite warning: Don’t go any further, and force me to be positively rude to you.

Swayed by his strong physical passion, and blinded by the dogged determination he has to remain master of it, he is absolutely insensible of another’s suffering.

Had the girl had greater experience with men, more hardihood and less modesty; if she could have approached him, and taken his hands and pressed them to her bosom; if she had had the courage to force upon him the mysterious influence of physical contact, Stephen’s control would have melted in the kindled fire.

Words stir the brain, and through the brain, the senses; but with some people it’s a long way round.

Touch stirs the nerves, and its flame runs through the body like a flying pain.

Stephen’s physical nerves were far more sensitive than his brain, and had the girl been a woman of the half-world, or even of the world, she could have succeeded. But she was a girl; and her modesty and innocence, the chastity of all her mental and physical being, hung like dead weights upon her in the encounter.

His words, his tones, his glance simply paralyze her-not figuratively, but positively. Her physical power to move towards him, to make a further appeal to him, is gone. Speech is dried upon her lips, wiped from them as a handkerchief passed over them might take their moisture.

She looks at him, dumb, frenzied with the intense longing to throw herself actually at his feet, but yet held back by some irresistible power she cannot comprehend, any more than one can comprehend the stifling, overpowering force in a nightmare.

It is the simple result of her life, her breeding, her virtue, her character, her habits of control and reserve. She is the fashionable, well-brought-up girl, with all her sensitive instincts in revolt against forcing herself upon a man indifferent to her, and full of an overwhelming instinctive timidity that her desire is wild to break down and cannot.

She stares at him, lost in a sense of bitter pain. All her vigorous life seems wrung with pain, and in that torture, in which every nerve seems bruised and quivering, a faint smile twists at last the pale, trembling lips. “You would have made a good vivisector!” she says. Then, before he has time to answer, she turns the handle of the door behind her, opens it and goes out.

A second after the street door closes, and Stephen stands on the dining-room mat, looking down the empty hall. Thoroughly disturbed and excited, with all his own passion surging heavily through his blood, and her last sentence-that he does not understand any more than he understands his own cruelty-ringing in his ears, he hesitates a minute, and then re-enters the dining-room, shuts to the door, and walks savagely up and down.

“Extraordinary girl!” he mutters. “What does she want? What can I do? She knows I can say nothing at present, when I’m going into the work-house myself! But what a splendid creature she is! Lots of ‘go’ in her. Well, I don’t care. I’ll have her one day; but there’s no use making a lot of talk about it now.”

May walked away from his doorstep, no longer a sane human being, responsible for its actions. The whole physical, nervous system, weakened by months of self-control, and night following night of sleeplessness, was hopelessly dislocated now.

The whole weight of her excited passion, flung back upon the sensitive brain, turned it from its balance. It had been a brilliant brain, and that very excitability that had lent its brilliance was fatal to it now.

The hopeless passion ran like a corroding poison through the inflammable tissue.

She had put the matter to the test, and found that truth of which the mere possibility had been torture. He had absolutely rejected her. “He could not care for me,” she kept repeating, as the silent air round her seemed full of his cold, short laughs.

His passion for her was dead. It had existed, surely-those looks of his, the sudden violence of his touch when there was any excuse for the slightest contact with her-or had it all been some curious dream?

She could not tell now, but whether it had been or not, it was no longer. To her that seemed the only explanation of his words and tones. To the tender female nature the depth of brutality in the passion of the male-that is, in fact, the very sign of it-remains always an enigma.

After the scene just passed, it seemed to the girl impossible, ludicrous, to suppose that Stephen loved her.

She had already made great allowance for him. She had a large share of the gift of her sex-intuition; and she had understood more than many women would have done, but to-night he had gone beyond the limits of her imagination.

“No man would be so intensely unkind to a woman he cared for,” she argued. “For nothing, when there is no need.”

She was not an unreasonable, nor selfish, nor silly girl. Had Stephen told her he loved her, but that they must suppress their passion, that she must wait, she would have obeyed him, and waited months, years, gone down to her grave waiting, in patient fidelity to him. Her qualities of control were as fine as his, and her devotion to a man who loved her would have been limitless, but, acting according to his views, Stephen had taken some trouble to convince her he was not the man, and she was convinced.

And being convinced, the vision of her life without him seemed just then a dismal waste, impossible to face.

In most of the actions of the human being, the physical state of the person at the time is the principal factor, and May’s whole physical frame, violently over-strained, craved for rest-rest that the excited brain could not give. Rest was the urgent demand pressed by the breaking nervous system, and from these two thoughts-rest, oblivion-grew the dangerous thought of Death.

“Sleep and forget! but I can’t,” she thought, “and if I do, there is the horrible awakening;” and again her fatigue suggested all the past sleepless nights, and the craving of the body urged the brain to find better means of satisfying it, in the same way as the appetite for food forces the brain to devise methods for procuring it.

She walked on in a straight line from Stephen’s house, and the road happened to pass a post-office. May stopped and looked absently through its lighted, notice-covered panes.

“Send him a few lines,” she thought; “because I am so stupid, I could not tell him enough, and then-”

She did not finish the sentence, but all beyond was blank peace. She went in, bought a letter-card, and wrote:-

“I could have loved you devotedly, intensely, had you wished it, but you have made it clear to-night that you do not want love-at any rate, not mine. I have discovered that I have courage enough to die, but not to live without you. I am going to the sea now, and in an hour we shall be separated for ever. I shall know nothing and you will care nothing, so it seems a good arrangement. My last thought will be of you, my last desire for you, my last breath your name.”

She fastened it with an untrembling hand, passed out of the office, posted it, and went straight down a side street to the parade.

The night was still, bound in a frosty silence. The temperature sank momentarily, and the icy grip intensified in the air. Overhead the sky was black, and glittered coldly with the winter stars. Beside and behind her and before her not a living creature’s footstep broke the silence. The sea lay smooth, black, and motionless on her left, like some huge sleeping monster.

She walked on rapidly: a glorious, vigorous, living, youthful figure, full of that tremendous activity of brain and pulse and blood, so valuable when there is a use for it, so dangerous when thrown back upon itself.

“How I could have loved him, worshipped him, lived for him, had he but wanted me!” is the one instinctive cry of her whole nature.

At the first easy descent to the beach she turns from the parade, and goes down, passing without hesitation from the light down to the moist darkness of the beach. To get away into oblivion, to escape from this maddening sense of pain, to lose it, let it go from her like a garment in the black water, is her only impelling instinct.

She sees the glimmer of the water before her without a shudder. How much dearer and more inviting it seems to her tired eyes than her bed at home, where so many, many sleepless, anguished nights have been spent! Here-rest and sleep, with no awakening to a grey and barren to-morrow. The thought of Death is lost. Desire for the cessation of pain is keener at its height than even the desire for life.

She stumbles on the wet, black beach at the water’s edge, and then finds where it is slipping like oil over the sand.

She walks forward, and the chill of the water rises round her ankles, then her knees, then her waist, and then she throws herself face forwards on it, as she once thought to fling herself on his breast.

In a half-drunken satisfaction she stretches her arms out in it and commences to swim towards the horizon. “Like his arms!” she thinks, as the water encircles her. “Like his lips!” she thinks, as it presses on her throat. “And as cold as his nature.”

The following morning is calm and still-a perfect specimen of wintry beauty. A light frost covers the ground and sparkles on the trees.

There is a faint chill in the clear air, a tranquil calm on the gently rising and falling sea and in the lucid sky.

The sunlight falling on Stephen’s bed and across his sleeping face shows a smile there, and his arm, lying on the coverlet-an arm thinned by constant fever and night-sweats-rests, in his thoughts, round her neck; that white neck so sweetly familiar in his dreams.

After a time he wakes and yawns, and turns his head heavily towards the window; and farther as the happy unconsciousness of sleep recedes from his face, and recollection and intelligence come back to it, more clearly show the haggard lines, traced all over it, of self-repression, seaming and marking it at five-and-twenty.

“Another day to be got through,” he thinks merely, as Nature’s most precious gift-the light-pours glowing through the panes.

When half-an-hour later he opens his door to take in his boots, he finds two letters with them, and at the sight of one his heart beats hard.

The other is in the girl’s handwriting, and he lays it on his toilet-table, with the thought, “Asking me to go and see her, I suppose,” and turns to the other with a mad impatience.

This is evidently the official letter with reference to his post-the post that means to him but this one thing: her possession.

He bursts it open, and in less than two seconds his eye takes in its news: he has the appointment.

The blood leaps over his face, and an exultant fire runs through his frame and along his veins.

He replaces the letter quietly in its cover with but the slightest tremor of his fingers.

Then he gets up from the bedside and stands in the middle of the room, looking through the sparkling panes.

“I have her!” he is thinking. “Yes, by God! at last I have her!”

The day is glorified; life is transfigured.

Through his whole body mounts that boundless exhilaration of desire on the point of satisfaction. Not momentary desire, easily and recently awakened, but the long desire that has been goaded and baited to fury through weeks and months of repression, and tempered to a terrible acuteness in pain and suffering, like steel by flame.

And now triumph, and a delight beyond expression, bounds like an electrified pulse throughout all his strong, vigorous frame.

The lines seem to fade from his face, the mouth relaxes, and then he laughs, as he makes a step towards the window, flings it open, and leans out into the keen air.

“At last I can speak out decently. No one could think I cared for her money, or any of that rot now. How unexpected!-this morning! Now I can tell her I’m free, independent! I am glad I waited-it was much better. Far better, as I said, to be patient. Last night I almost-and now I’m very glad I didn’t.”

He draws his head back, and turns to the glass to shave with a light heart.

As he does so, he sees her letter again, and picks it up. “You darling!” he thinks, “I’ll make you understand all now.”

Some miles westward of the pier, some fathoms deep, out of reach of the quiet sunlight lying on the surface, tosses the girl’s body, senseless and pulseless, with all the million possibilities of pleasure that filled those keen nerves and supple limbs gone out of them for ever, and Stephen draws out her despairing letter of eternal farewell, with a smile lighting up his handsome, pleasing face.

“Yes, it was much better to wait,” he murmurs, “I don’t approve of rushing things!”